In 1989, she became head of drama at Granada, where other programmes she oversaw included Jeeves and Wooster (1990-93), The Cloning of Joanna May (1992) and Maigret (1992-93). At LWT, she commissioned two literary adaptations, Jane Eyre (1997) and Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1998), as well as Wokenwell (1997). (Anthony Hayward)
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A paper rose handmade from the pages of Wuthering Heights.If you’re looking for a first anniversary gift (paper is traditional), a present for a book lover, or just something more meaningful than flowers that die in a week – this is it. Each Wuthering Heights rose is made from old pages of Emily Brontë’s classic novel. Often sourced from charity shops, these books, approaching their end of life are given a new lease of life and transformed into a treasured keepsake.Why choose a literary paper rose?Real roses wilt. These don’t. They’re perfect for paper anniversaries, romantic gifts for book lovers, or anyone who appreciates classic literature. Wuthering Heights is one of the great love stories – dark, passionate, unforgettable. If it’s their favourite book, this becomes personal, and you’ll become the best gift giver ever.What you get:∙ One handmade Wuthering Heights rose (bouquets are also available)∙ Stem wrapped in floral tape for an authentic look∙ Approximately 30cm tall∙ Lasts foreverEach rose is slightly different depending on which pages I use, which makes every one unique.Other custom book roses are available – want a rose from Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, or your favourite book? Just ask.Handmade in the UK. Made to order. Ships ready to gift.The head of the rose only measures approximately 8cm at its widest point (some variation will occur due to the handmade nature of this product) and approximately 5cm in height. This is then attached to a covered wire stem with a leaf that measures approximately 25cm in height meaning that the whole rose measures approximately 8cm at its widest point and approximately 30cm in height.
Fans of Outlander will recognize familiar elements immediately: a passionate romance, gothic atmosphere, and a fiercely independent heroine. Jane Eyre even contains a subtle supernatural element: Jane and Rochester’s bond, despite being at times problematic and tragic, is tightly woven by a mysterious power–typical of gothic novels–difficult to detect, but impossible to ignore.Jane’s unwavering emotional and moral equality in her relationships feels very modern and close to Claire’s worldview. Both women are passionate, loyal, steadfast in their beliefs, and possess an inner strength that makes them remarkable. If you empathize with Claire, you almost certainly will love Jane, one of literature’s great heroines. (Noelle Mazzoni)
The show is set at the world's first ever Jane Eyre Convention, where we find a group of slightly neurotic Bronte-aficinados gathered to reenact scenes from their favourite novel.As the group share their passion for all things Jane Eyre, they squabble and fight over the best bits, and conflict over authentic interpretations; also experiencing real emotions as they follow the character of Jane on her journey, including wailing running across the moors! More memorable scenes from the book are relived, as the group attempt to rescue shackled Bertha from the attic. (...)Jane Eyre Convention is performing June 9-13 at The Bread and Roses Theatre, Clapham and will have another engagement from July 24-25 at the Hope Theatre, Islington. Tickets are available to purchase online from venue websites or box offices. (Marissa Faith Curley)
AnneBrontë.org posts about Anne's Last Journey to York.
Cameron Zwierlein, Chapman UniversitySpring 5-2026First Advisor: Joanna LevinSecond Advisor Lynda HallThird Advisor: Rei MagosakiAbstractThis thesis examines representations of female food refusal across Wuthering Heights, Play It As It Lays, “Los Angeles,” and The Vegetarian, arguing that restrictive food behavior extends beyond individual psychology to function as a culturally embedded form of protest. Drawing on Susan Bordo’s theoretical framework, this thesis looks at the female body as a site disciplined by patriarchal norms, where the refusal of food becomes a paradoxical act that simultaneously resists and reproduces systems of control. Through the characters of Catherine, Maria, Alice, and Yeong-hye, these texts depict food refusal as a symbolic language used in contexts where conventional forms of agency are constrained or silenced.Despite differences in historical and cultural context, these works converge in portraying anorectic behaviors as both an assertion of autonomy and an internalization of oppressive ideals surrounding femininity and control. This duality reveals the inherent contradictory nature of food refusal. It operates as a form of protest against patriarchal expectations while also enacting self-erasure. Ultimately, this thesis argues that such acts of resistance are limited in their transformative potential, as they often culminate in further alienation, exploitation, or even death. By situating these narratives within a broader cultural and theoretical context, this thesis demonstrates how female food refusal demonstrates a complex, yet ultimately unsustainable, negotiation of female identity, agency, and power.
“I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading: It vexes me to choose another guide.” The quote of the day Emily Brontë perfectly summarizes the significance of listening to your instincts and being faithful to yourself.The author implies that there is no point to make oneself conform to the will of others, which may prove to be exhausting and uncomfortable. (Alisha Louis)
The quote comes from the poem Stanzas (Often rebuked, yet always back returning), whose attribution to Emily Brontë is somehow controversial.
Screening towards the end of the Cannes Film Festival, the Un Certain Regard entry Victorian Psycho, directed by Zachary Wigon, is easily one of the guilty pleasures of this year’s selection. Based on the novel by Spanish author Virginia Feito, the film is a blend of classic Victorian novels, such as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, and murder stories tinged with deprivation, as suggested by the title, which recalls American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis and its subsequent 2000 film adaptation directed by Mary Harron. (Veronica Orciari)
In conjunction with the Wesley Centre in Malton, Kemps Bookstore will welcome acclaimed authors Essie Fox and Stephanie Bramwell-Lawes for an evening of gothic fiction.Inspired by 19th-century novelists and poets, Essie is a bestselling author of gothic historical fiction and has lectured at several esteemed institutions, including the V&A Museum, the Westminster Library, and the National Gallery.Her books include a Sunday Times Book of the Month, Dangerous, which features Lord Byron as a detective in Venice, and Catherine, an intriguing retelling of Emily Brontë’s classic Wuthering Heights from Catherine’s perspective.Likewise, Stephanie is a lifelong admirer of Victorian literature, with her favourite novels, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, heavily inspiring her much-anticipated debut novel, Thornby Manor. (...)Essie and Stephanie will be in conversation at the Wesley Centre on June 5 for a quintessentially gothic evening, perfect for fans of the Brontë sisters.The event starts at 7.30 pm, and the doors and bar open at 6.45 pm. Tickets are £10 per person or £20 for a ticket and a book. (Karen Darley)
Charli XCX’s album accompanying Emerald Fennell’s take on Charlotte Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a fascinating listen, capturing the gothic nature of the story but still maintaining a contemporary lens. (...)Overall, Charli XCX’s interpretation of Wuthering Heights through music is really fitting but can be listened to through modern music fans and how relationships can be turned toxic very quickly. In may ways it is a powerful listen.
'Jugada maestra': Heathcliff en el siglo XXI (:..)Y es que Beckett Redfellow, rebosante de resentimiento generacional y de clase, es la reencarnación del Heathcliff de 'Cumbres Borrascosas' para esta era. O del Conde de Montecristo para este III Milenio. En un entorno de monstruoso capitalismo. Por todo eso, algunos creemos que 'Jugada maestra' es precisamente lo que su título proclama. (Begoña Del Teso) (Translation)
'¡Átame!', la 'Cumbres borrascosas' de AlmodóvarEn 1989, Pedro Almodóvar estrenó una película que recibió 15 nominaciones al Goya y no ganó un solo cabezón. Pero el tiempo la ha acabado encumbrando como una de sus obras magistrales: ¡Átame! Protagonizada por Victoria Abril y Antonio Banderas, ¡Átame! puede verse en Netflix y Movistar Plus+. Y es el argumento audiovisual que Almodóvar podría esgrimir para que le aceptasen una adaptación de Cumbres borrascosas.Buñuel y, algo menos, Kosminsky y Fennell han subrayado la perversidad de Heathcliff, el protagonista de Cumbres borrascosas. Sin embargo, en la novela de Brontë, salvo el narrador (un hombre sin nombre que trata a Heathcliff y escucha, por parte de su criada, toda su historia) y algún personaje secundario, toda la fauna del título de Brontë es borrascosa. Empezando por Catherine, a la que se tiende a santificar en las películas o, a lo sumo, a verla como víctima de una obsesión ante el maligno Heathcliff. (Julio Mármol) (Translation)
Cathy's armpits (sic) are still discussed in many places, like Cosmopolitan, for instance. The Cinemaholic discusses how the novel features Heathcliff's race. Nothing new, really. Also in The Cinemaholic, an article about Jacob Elordi's wigs and face hair in Wuthering Heights 2026.
Renowned Brontë scholar, historian and illustrator Eleanor Houghton joins us to discuss her recently published book Charlotte Brontë's Life Through Clothes.
Eleanor Houghton summarizes the podcast on her Instagram:
What became of Charlotte Brontë’s wedding dress?No photographs survive. No physical trace of the original gown remains. And yet, through descriptions, recollections, sketches, and a long-lost reconstruction, it becomes possible to glimpse the dress she wore in June 1854: white book muslin, softly pleated, unexpectedly romantic.It was an enormous joy to discuss this now shadowy dress and the fascinating emotional logic that lay behind Charlotte’s choice to marry in white, with the brilliant @the_art_of_dress for @dressed_podcast.Our episode aired yesterday, so do go and listen!In our lively chat, we trace Charlotte’s relationship with clothing throughout her life and think about the garments she wore as she grew, taught, travelled, wrote, became famous, loved, grieved, and eventually married.There is so much more to say about this gown than could ever fit into a reel. So, for more, listen to the podcast and read ‘Charlotte Brontë’s Life Through Clothes’ (Bloomsbury, 2026).
There’s a chilling promise in the preface of “This Dark Night,” Deborah Lutz’s account of the life of a celebrated early-19th-century English poet and novelist. “With this biography,” writes the author, “I work to place Emily Brontë in the history of more modern ways of thinking.”The phrase “more modern ways of thinking” may curdle the blood of the reader, who may brace for Ms. Lutz to inculpate her subject in matters of race, class and gender. Happily, there’s no cause for alarm. The reader’s blood can resume its easy flow. Such elements do appear in the book, but there’s no sense that Ms. Lutz has strained to find and exploit them. Rather than offering the usual tedious politics, she gives us lavish servings of literary aesthetics. By the end, the reader understands much of what went into Brontë’s making, and leaves feeling grateful, buffeted and a little awestruck by the intense, self-contained, short-lived author of one of the world’s most esteemed novels.Had Brontë survived past 30, she might have worked yet-greater literary marvels, but as it is she left us with “Wuthering Heights,” a bravura work of melodrama published in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. The novel was slow to sell and slow to find its place in the canon. Brontë was dead before it bore her name. Early reviewers, writes Ms. Lutz, found the book “too gloomy, savage, and eccentric.” She speculates that its harsh reception may have to some degree gratified its author who, after all, “did mean to write a savage, cruel, and gloomy novel.”In “This Dark Night,” Ms. Lutz, a professor literature at Pennsylvania State University, deploys flash and elegance when tracing the wellsprings of her subject’s genius to their sources. Brontë was born in 1818 into a household acquainted with grief; her mother died in 1821 and her two eldest siblings within weeks of each other in 1825. She grew up primarily in the company of her sisters (Charlotte and Anne) and brother (Branwell), with their father (Patrick), in splendid seclusion in a parsonage near England’s West Yorkshire moors.From her earliest years, Emily thrilled to the austere glories of the landscape, with its great desolate stretches of rocky turf and rushing waterways all shaped and pummeled by winds that whistled and “wuthered.” She was alive to folklore that told of fairies and elves and the lingering dead. She developed, writes Ms. Lutz, a “weird, witchy” sense of humor, doodled violent images in the margins of her books and made a specialty, in her poetry and prose, of the “nocturnal and crepuscular.”Most importantly, Brontë spent her formative years in a kind of grand literary apprenticeship. Most children toggle back and forth between reality and fantasy and leave imaginative play behind (or become incapable of engaging in it) around puberty. The Brontë siblings were able to extend their time of enchantment by staying at home, socializing with one another and committing wholly to living in realms of their own creation: Charlotte and Branwell in the fictive land of Angria, Anne and Emily in Gondal.The siblings concocted complex lineages and histories for their countries, writing Angrian and Gondalian tales and verse in tiny homemade books. Their reading, writing and collaboration went on for years. It is hard to imagine a better hothouse for growing gaudy literary flowers, and therefore perhaps no surprise that all four Brontës would be published, but still it is a wonder that from this one crowded nursery should spring not one but two of the most distinguished novels ever penned: “Wuthering Heights” and, earlier the same year, Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre.”In adulthood, the need for ready money forced each of the Brontës to leave their creative idyll for a time—all of them worked as educators—before returning home. The three girls embarked on novels, writing alone during the days and meeting in the evenings to talk over points of plot and character.The turbulent Branwell was the first literary Brontë to be published (a poem, not a novel), but also the first to die: drink, despair and tuberculosis put him in a grave at 31. Emily, 13 months his junior, was soon to follow, though even as she sickened (probably also from tuberculosis), she likely continued to disappear into the parallel worlds of her imagination. In her subject’s consciousness, writes Ms. Lutz, “through the scrim of the real appeared, indistinctly, a land where people and objects could shapeshift, where dreams provided texture. Something might lie behind or deep inside the mundane; almost anything could function as an entryway to the miraculous, the sublime.”As to the elements of modern thinking, Ms. Lutz does explore Brontë’s love life. She alludes to a mysterious adolescent entanglement of which scholars know little (incredibly, for a woman who wrote so much, very little of Brontë’s correspondence is known to exist), and notes here and there the possible influence of lesbians.In another nod to modern thinking, missing almost entirely from this vivid narrative is the role of Christianity in the life of a young woman who in girlhood said her prayers, who as a teenager carefully reproduced an engraving of an ascetic saint and who would have heard church bells ringing every day of her life. Brontë was fascinated by silent crypts and tormenting passions. These are aspects of the gothic sensibility, of course; they might also, for a clergyman’s daughter, have come from a different guiding philosophy. (Meghan Cox Gurdon)
Emerald Fennell says period-realistic scene emphasising Cathy’s lack of razors was shot but did not make final cutThe Wuthering Heights director Emerald Fennell said it was “unfortunate” that a scene showing Margot Robbie’s hairy armpits did not make the final cut, because women in period adaptations are often shown with clean-shaven underarms.Robbie’s character, Cathy, had “extremely hairy armpits” in the 2026 adaptation of the novel, but “unfortunately the scene that we see them didn’t make it in there”, said the director.Cathy having unshaven pits “was so important to me”, she said, adding that she often wonders “where are the razors that these women are using?” when watching Jane Austen adaptations.“They’re all kind of hairless like eels. I’m like: ‘What’s going on? It’s completely mad.’”Fennell spoke to an audience at Hay festival in Wales on Friday evening. Her sexed-up adaptation of Emily Brontë’s gothic novel, starring Robbie alongside Jacob Elordi, was released on Valentine’s Day this year.Fennell described it as a “sister, not a twin” of the book, saying that she “couldn’t make” the original. “It’s so brilliant,” she added.Asked about the infamous “skin room” – Cathy’s husband, Edgar Linton, gives her bedroom a bespoke design with walls that resemble her skin – Fennell joked that in marketing meetings the team considered asking Farrow & Ball to make a Cathy’s skin themed colour.They also asked Robbie to send close-up images of the underside of her wrist in order to reproduce her veins on the walls.Fennell also spoke about the much-discussed “fish scene”, in which Cathy sticks her finger into a dead fish’s mouth.“I saw a fish in aspic and I thought: ‘I want to stick my finger in its mouth.’ And then I was like, ‘Well, I think if you were trapped, and you were extremely sexually frustrated, the first thing you’d do is …’“We had all of the different fish, we had fish with lipstick on, we had real fish, fake fish, in the end that was a real fish. But poor Margot. I mean she had to do that. There were 12 of them.”On her directorial approach, Fennell said that “being embarrassing, being cringe” is a “really big thing” for her.“Especially now in our culture, we are so phobic and terrified of being cringe, or being earnest, and so we’ve got this deadening ambivalence about everything, and I feel, for me, I want to get in and go for it, and push it off a cliff.”Fennell said she is taking time off from film-making to make jigsaw puzzles, see her family, disconnect from the internet and read Sarah J Maas novels.“And I’m coming up secretly with something so depraved, so profoundly evil, that nobody’s going to make it.” (Ella Creamer)
In the era of BookTok, many fans find themselves drawn to stories fueled by yearning. Some might want to step into a romantasy, where bat-winged boys sweep their powerful protagonists off their feet, while others prefer a more real-world scenario with some sports thrown in to spice things up. So it comes as no surprise that when said readers discover the hyper romantic content of the past, they find themselves either entrenched or disappointed with the lack of fangirl appeal. Either the material doesn’t have the steamy passages found in more modern romances or there’re too many problematic elements getting in the way of diving deep into the fantasy.One such example comes in the form of Emily Brontë’s tragic soap-operatic tale, Wuthering Heights. From the highly debated depictions of its lead characters to the evolving question of whether the central romantic pair are terrible people or victims of circumstance, there’s no shortage of topics to debate within this masterpiece. But when you add the controversial filmmaking choices of writer/director Emerald Fennell (Saltburn) into a new film adaptation, along with the casting of Margot Robbie (Barbie) and Jacob Elordi (Frankenstein)? The fandom disputes get turned up to 11. Now, thanks to Warner Bros., this highly deliberated version has landed on home video. Are the hot takes surrounding it warranted? Or is it a misunderstood gem? The answer is as full of twists and turns as Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship. [...]Thankfully, Warner Bros.’s home release captures the visual splendor of Fennell’s adaptation in sparkling quality. Not only does the 4K release showcase the cinematography in all its beauty, but the sound, in particular, replicates that of its theatrical release (which works to enhance the Charli XCX’s songs as well as the Dolby Atmos version did.) Similarly brilliant are special features. From the delicious commentary by Fennell herself which dives deep into her mindset while making the film to a multitude of behind-the-scenes featurettes, it’s wonderful to see a home release befitting the efforts that went into the film, something that feels rare for most new movies getting the 4K treatment these days.Ultimately, regardless of whether you like this very different take on Emily Brontë’s classic or not, it goes without saying that Fennell’s adaptation is cinematic. Sure, it might be missing half of the story while also changing quite a number of the factors that make most readers love the original story, but there’s a degree of craft, detail, and genuine artistry found within every frame of this sumptuous romantic venture. It’s just a shame that this level of passion couldn’t have, instead, been poured into something we haven’t already seen many times over. (Dalin Rowell)
There are the faintest echoes of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre in the Yorkshire Moors setting. (David Rooney)
Khushbakht Irshad, Monitoring Officer, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Education and Monitoring Authority, PakistanYusra Ali, M.Phil Scholar, Department of English, Institute of Management Sciences, Peshawar, PakistanSocial Sciences Spectrum, 5(2), 144–151DOI: https://doi.org/10.71085/sss.05.02.527AbstractThis paper investigates the proportion to which silence and speech is an interdependent power negotiation strategy in female-to-female interaction in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Although comprehensive study on feminist scholarship on the verbal agency of Jane against the agents of patriarchal society has been carried out, there is still relatively little focus on the linguistic relationship that arise between females. This study focuses on the critical aspect of the relationships between Jane and female characters like Mrs. Reed, Helen Burns, Blanche Ingram, and the rivers sisters Diana and Mary with the help of textual analysis. This study uses feminist narrative and discourse-pragmatic approaches as framework. The analysis highlights that Bronte creates an economy of women speech, voices, and silence, whereby morality, affection, resistance, and the bargaining of social order are manifested with the use of speech and silence as tools. Silence serves as a communicative act of purpose for enforcing repression, emotional restraint, moral superiority or subversive defiance. Speech acts, on the other hand, are contention, sympathetic, and power areas. This discussion helps in widening the critical perception of the gendered power relations within the novel. It paved the way for larger discussions about the topic of women use of language for constructing gendered norms in the Victorian novel by emphasizing the role of a female-to-female communication narrative as opposed to the traditional male-female dynamic.
Emily Brontë, who died, aged 30, in 1848, is a source of perennial fascination – and potentially a biographer’s nightmare. Her single novel, Wuthering Heights, has long been recognised as one of the greatest in the English canon, yet it remains a strange anomaly, seemingly unmoored from the wider history of Victorian fiction. Her haunting poems – of which there are 70-odd – can make you catch your breath. Meanwhile, like the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw, the most inscrutable of the Brontë sisters seems to appear only to disappear.This is primarily – but perhaps not entirely – down to the prosaic fact that so few of her personal papers survive, which is not the case with most Victorian writers, including her older sister Charlotte. None of Emily’s letters are extant, save for two brief, unrevealing notes. The manuscript of Wuthering Heights has gone missing, as, more intriguingly, has that of her second novel, title and subject unknown.Also lost are the multi-volume prose narratives that she wrote in partnership with her younger sister Anne about ‘Gondal’, the imaginary kingdom they invented together as children and which went on to occupy their imaginations – especially Emily’s – into adulthood. Her surviving poetry is often written in the voices of Gondal characters, including a passionate, imperious queen who seems like a rehearsal for Cathy, though the full saga remains unclear. Without the Gondal prose, we can’t trace the development of the storytelling skill that created Wuthering Heights, which, as a result, seems to burst mysteriously upon the world fully formed.Julian Barnes once compared a biography to a net: a series of holes tied together with string. How to construct a convincing life out of scraps is a more pressing problem in Emily’s case than in most, especially given the quiet and insular external existence she appears to have led. She is not known to have made a single friend outside her family, and was resistant to going out into the world, preferring to stay at home in Haworth on the edge of her beloved Yorkshire moors.Over the past century, the lack of data has often invited wild biographical speculation, based on the unfounded assumption that the creator of Cathy and Heathcliff must have been inspired by some secret real-life love affair, though no clinching evidence has ever been found. (The 2022 biopic Emily has her engaging in ludicrously unlikely bodice-ripping sex with a local curate.). So it’s a relief that Deborah Lutz politely refuses to go any distance down that particular rabbit hole. She is well aware – as Emily’s serious biographers have always been – that the more interesting truth is to be found in the few but precious personal documents that do survive, and the glimpses they give us into her idiosyncratic mind.Emily’s four so-called ‘diary papers’ (two others were written jointly with Anne), produced over the years, demonstrate how at ease she was at living in two parallel worlds at once. Her fantasy life bleeds into the workaday reality of the laundrywoman when she records, as a teen, that ‘the Gondals are discovering the interior of Gaaldine Sally mosley is washing in the back kitchin’. The slapdash spelling and lack of punctuation says much about her utter uninterest in conforming to convention.Meanwhile, a clutch of French compositions, written in her early twenties when she was studying in Brussels during a rare absence from Haworth, have long since offered critics an opening into what seems like a dark and uncompromising soul. One passage translates as: ‘Nature… exists on a principle of destruction. Every being must be the tireless instrument of death to others, or itself must cease to live.’ Such proto-Darwinian nihilism sums up Emily’s refusenik rejection of Victorian moral sentimentality.Lutz is in a strong position to approach Emily, given that she has been thinking about the Brontës for a long time. Her 2015 book The Brontë Cabinet is an engaging study of physical objects associated with the family, including the brass collar once worn by Emily’s fearsome bulldog, Keeper. That feeling for material culture carries over into this new biography. It’s intriguing, for example, to be reminded that the very earliest surviving text from Emily’s hand is written not in ink but in thread: the sampler that she stitched when she was eight. The biblical verse it features – ‘Who hath gathered the wind in his fists?’ – uncannily presages Wuthering Heights with its cosmic forces. So, too, does the extreme neatness of the needlework. Emily’s novel may deal with uncontrollable emotions and wild weather but it is a masterpiece of literary control.Lutz is right to define her subject as a ‘consummate artist’ and ‘masterful writer’. It might be tempting to see Emily’s lifelong addiction to Gondal as mere arrested development. But it’s more meaningful to view it as symptomatic of a determination to cut out distraction: the place where she disciplined herself in the perfectionist demands of making what would turn out, in her best poems and in her novel, to be world-class, timeless art.The slapdash spelling in the ‘diary papers’ says much about Emily’s uninterest in conforming to conventionFew female writers of her era (perhaps of any) have been able to be so ruthless in protecting their creative space. Yet – unlike her sisters, who took governess jobs so that she could stay at home – Emily was not much interested in feminism as a social movement. She positively enjoyed unpaid housework because its repetitive – even meditative – bodily motions allowed her mind to roam free.Lutz traces how conflicting images of open and confined spaces flow through Emily’s known writings as the twin poles of her ‘world within’. Dungeons and graves fill her poetry, simultaneously attracting and horrifying her, as much as do the unbounded natural landscapes of the moors that she loved. By the time she was seven, she had seen her mother and two eldest sisters interred in the vault of the church opposite the family home. Heathcliff would later dig up Cathy’s corpse.By tracing such leitmotifs through Emily’s writings, Lutz creates a through-thread to connect the fragmentary sources. Elsewhere, she compensates for the absences by drawing more generally on the work of social historians to flesh out her subject’s material environment, informing us about, say, Victorian sanitary towels, the smell of tallow candles, or how cold it was in an early railway carriage.But it’s her interest in Emily’s manuscripts as physical entities that shines out, inspiring her to reconstruct her subject’s working practices. She has the alertness of a true bibliophile when it comes to the quirks of the original paper and ink of Emily’s poetry manuscripts. Lutz draws on the work of the late great Brontë scholar Tom Winnifrith to explain the probable process of Wuthering Heights’s composition. Such textually informed speculation is of a wholly different order to the cautionary tale offered by the biographer who once misread the title of a Gondal poem – in fact ‘Love’s Farewell’ – as ‘Louis Parensell’, and identified the said imaginary Louis as Emily’s lost lover.Occasionally, Lutz indulges in poetic licence, as when she applies the phrase used of the fictional Cathy – ‘a wild, wick slip’ – to Emily herself; or when she tells us that Emily ‘certainly’ role-played Cathy up on the moors. She also wants it both ways when it comes to the controversy – which got Charlotte’s first biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell, into trouble in 1857 – as to just how bad the boarding school fictionalised in Jane Eyre really was. We’re told that the pupils’ meals were nutritious compared to many of their contemporaries’, but also that the Brontës’ eldest sister Maria died from an infection contracted as a result of the ‘poor nutrition’ provided at the school.Those very minor cavils aside, it says much for Lutz’s skills as a writer that she succeeds in creating such a seamless and compelling narrative out of her materials. Her insight and sensitivity as a critic, as well her deep knowledge of the sources, allow her to open up the inner life of her famously reclusive subject. The result is a convincing portrait and an impressive achievement.
Ted Hughes memorably labeled Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë the “three weird sisters,” and Emily has typically been seen as the weirdest of the three. Gauche, aloof, and dowdy, she channeled her energies into creating intense, brooding poetry and a famously sui generis novel, Wuthering Heights, seething with storms and otherworldly passion.The loss of almost all of Emily’s papers — thousands of pages of prose and poetry and all but three of her letters — no doubt partially explains the customary view of her as elusive and mysterious. In This Dark Night, Deborah Lutz, the George and Barbara Kelly Professor in Nineteenth-Century English and American Literature at Penn State, has attempted to reconstruct Emily’s life using a wealth of primary and secondary sources, including weather reports, the diaries of Emily’s neighbors, and local newspapers, as well as Brontë manuscripts that had been missing for over 100 years.The result is a judicious and accessible biography that interweaves Emily’s quotidian routines and trials in a parsonage on the edge of bleak Yorkshire moorland with an imaginative and creative life that would culminate in the dark drama of Heathcliff and Cathy. [...]Patrick was a curate who hailed from a poor Irish family. His father’s surname was Ó Pronntaigh — anglicized, it would be Prunty, Brunty, Branty, or perhaps Bruntee. Patrick alternately spelled his surname Brontè, Bronté, Brontê, and Brontē. As Lutz says, playing with names was a family obsession. Emily, who was the only one of the Brontë sisters with a middle name, saw herself as Emily Jane as a reminder of the many Janes on her mother’s side.The family had moved to Haworth from Thornton in 1820, and Emily would live there nearly all her life. She had only around a year of formal schooling. Patrick taught her at home, and she read avidly — everything from Aesop’s Fables and Virgil to Walter Scott, Dickens, and probably French novels that, as Lutz says, were thought to be “perverse, ‘unspeakably foul,’ and even dangerous.” Roaming the windswept moors, reading, and writing were her treasured means of escape from household chores.The young siblings began to write stories after Patrick gave Branwell a box of 12 wooden soldiers. The soldiers inspired the imaginary worlds of Glass Town and Angria. At the age of 12 or 13, Emily began to create the fantasyland of Gondal with her sister Anne, who was her best friend. Gondal would become an enduring obsession.Emily spent three months at Roe Head School in Mirfield, around 20 miles from Haworth, when she was 17. Lutz confirms that Emily didn’t thrive in exile. Forced to follow a strict routine for 12 hours a day, she felt penned in, and she didn’t make friends easily. She eventually fell ill and left for home. According to Charlotte, “Emily loved the moors...Liberty was the breath of Emily’s nostrils; without it she perished.”In 1838-39, Emily spent a short spell as an instructor at a girls’ school; in 1842, she accompanied Charlotte to Brussels to study at a boarding school. A student in Brussels who would become Charlotte’s lifelong friend said of Emily, “I simply disliked her from the first, her tallish, ungainly, ill-dressed figure contrasting so strongly with Charlotte’s small, neat, trim person.” On learning of the death of her aunt Elizabeth, Emily returned to Haworth with Charlotte. A later plan by the sisters to open a school at the parsonage failed to get off the ground.Charlotte, Emily, and Anne would go on to publish a volume of poems at their own expense using the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Only two copies were sold in the space of a year. Undaunted, Charlotte announced to the sisters’ publisher that they were preparing three novels for publication: The Professor, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey.Emily took around two years to finish Wuthering Heights — the only novel she left us — which was rejected at least four times before it found a publisher. She had to pay to have it published and, as Lutz confirms, the reviews were on the whole unfavorable. It was thought coarse, strange, savage, and eccentric. Emily would die in the year after it was published.The gaps in our knowledge of Emily’s life have fueled much speculation. Brontë scholars have been intrigued by the question of whether, in her 16th year, she had a romantic entanglement that led her father to suddenly decide to send her away to school. Conclusions have been drawn from her androgyny and boldness — a local described her as being “more like a man than a woman, and very dominant in will” — and from the male nickname (“The Major”) that she was given.Such questions are left open here. Lutz resists making judgments on whether Emily was autistic, dyslexic, asexual, queer, transgender, anti-racist, a feminist, or an environmentalist on the basis that “these twentieth- and twenty-first-century ideas and identities don’t import easily into the past.”Notwithstanding Charlotte’s verdict that Emily “had no worldly wisdom; her powers were unadapted to the practical business of life,” This Dark Night evidences her domesticity and anchors the account firmly in the everyday. Emily’s hours were filled with running the house — by sewing, baking, and cleaning — and she looked after the sisters’ finances, including their shares in the York and North Midland Railway Company. Her piano playing — she played with “precision and brilliancy” — and her love of animals provided release.Emily also learned how to shoot from her father, who, following an attack on a cloth mill by around 100 Luddites, had the habit of keeping a gun by him and discharging it out of the window each morning. She was unfashionable and extremely reserved, and she didn’t suffer fools gladly. She was, as Charlotte suggested, “a solitude-loving raven, no gentle dove.”Emily’s world is hauntingly rendered in This Dark Night. Wuthering weather (“wuthering” means characterized by strong winds) never left Haworth and the moors for long, and the average age of death in the area was 19 by some measures. The local church accommodated two or three funerals a week, so the sight of mourners and of graves being dug would have been familiar to the Brontë siblings. In the autumn, following the ancient English tradition of the bone fire (Lutz points to the likely origin of the word “bonfire” in the term), old bones that had been removed from graves to make way for the newly dead were burned. Small wonder Emily was much possessed by death and inclement weather. (Stuart Kay)
The Hay Festival has launched 'The Pleasure List', a crowd-sourced collection of 39 captivating books chosen by the public to revive the joy of reading across Britain. [...]The campaign has been developed in partnership with the National Year of Reading 2026, serving as a direct response to worrying statistics that suggest fewer and fewer people across the United Kingdom are choosing to read for pleasure in their spare time. (Aimée Walsh)
The film premiered last week Cannes, where early reactions praised its pitch-black humor and savage tone, comparing the movie to a collision between Jane Eyre and American Psycho. (Brad Miska)
'Wuthering Heights' by Emily BrontëMost people have heard of, if not read, Brontë's romantic and rather disturbing novel, first released in 1847 under a pseudonym. Some readers at the time found the tale immoral and its romantic lead, Heathcliff, too wild and cruel. An edited version, released in 1850, garnered more interest, and the harrowing, compelling novel is now considered a masterpiece.The recent Warner Bros. Pictures adaptation has drawn considerable attention. Many loyal Brontë fans were critical of the film, which turned a tale of obsessive love, abuse and revenge into something more palatable and glossy for theatergoers. Despite this, the movie was a huge box-office hit, with some speculating on its potential for an Oscar or two come 2027. (Gillian Harvey)
What’s more, through my reading I began to see that the Gothic is not only the terrain of personal terrors. Historical atrocities live there, too. Even in nineteenth century British classics, the Gothic is used to express the racism, sexism and colonialism we’d rather not see, the painful history—and present—we’d like to keep locked in the attic. Jane Eyre’s Rochester, who makes a fortune from the enslaved laborers on Caribbean sugar plantations, has a mad first wife in the attic—a symbol not only of his troubled romantic past, but the corruption and violence at the root of his fortune. [...]Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean RhysRhys published Wide Sargasso Sea, her feminist, post-colonialist prequel to Jane Eyre, after nine years of labor and 27 years of literary silence. It tells the story of Antoinette Cosway, a young white Creole woman in Dominica whose family is pushed into poverty after the end of slavery. Her opportunistic marriage to Mr. Rochester, meant to save her family from destitution, brings misery to all. He disdains her Creole identity; she mocks how poorly he understands the people and land around him. Rhys’s prose is lush, dark, and gorgeous. By giving literature’s famed “madwoman in the attic” a (new) name and a voice, Rhys showed that behind every fearsome Gothic monster is a wounded child bearing the mark of difference. Wide Sargasso Sea takes the subtle colonial critique of Jane Eyre and makes it explicit.
Oh, and yes, much to Sarah's relief, we made it to the Brontë Parsonage before they closed the door for the day. While Sarah was poring over one of the very desk boxes that the sisters wrote their manuscripts on, I struck up a conversation with a guide, who, after I explained why we arrived so late, told me about a 'classic mounting block' at nearby Ponden Hall."The hall is an historic 17th-century manor heavily associated with the Brontë family and often considered the inspiration for Thrushcross Grange in Wuthering Heights," she divulged."It's got five steps on either side, leading to a small platform atop, you'd absolutely love it," she said.No prizes for guessing where I took Sarah bright and early the next day. (Tim the Yowie Man)
Sat 23 May, 2:00pmBrontë Event Space in the Old School RoomA special opportunity to create your own flowers from human hair using traditional and self-devised techniques of braiding, spinning, weaving, sewing and knotting. These gestures draw on Victorian mourning hairwork and other marginalised craft traditions long dismissed as ornamental or sentimental. Participants will create small hairwork flowers, which can be mounted as pendants or keepsakes. Synthetic hair will be available as an alternative to natural hair.During the Victorian era hair was often weaved into jewellery for remembrance. We welcome back conceptual artist and historian Donna Lowson who will be leading this workshop guiding us through the history of Victorian hairwork.Donna Lowson is an artist, collector, and former hairdresser whose practice centres on working with human hair to uncover the stories embedded within it. Drawing on Georgian and Victorian hairwork, the 19th-century practice of creating jewellery and keepsakes from human hair, she uses making as a research method to uncover marginalised craft traditions and bring them into contemporary practice. Donna has collaborated with Bankfield Museum, contributing demonstrations and workshops as part of “In Loving Memory,” and ongoing museum collection study visits and hands-on historical research inform her work. She leads workshops that invite participants to experience the cultural, material, and historical significance of hair firsthand.
She also viewed the university’s collection of material associated with Yorkshire’s most famous literary family, the Brontës, whose father, Patrick Prunty (who changed his surname to avoid the connotation with Ireland), was originally from Co Down.“We’re claiming them back,” the President joked in reference to the Brontë sisters, Emily, Charlotte and Anne.Paper was scarce in 18th-century England and Connolly viewed a mock newspaper written up by Charlotte Brontë in tiny handwriting on an Epsom salts wrapper when she was just 13. Charlotte read the newspaper to the family collection of toy soldiers. (Ronan McGreevy)
She also mentioned Patrick Brontë, the County Down father of the Brontë sisters. (Charles Gray)
4. This Dark Night: The Life Of Emily Brontë by Deborah Lutz is published in hardback by Bloomsbury Continuum, priced £20 (ebook £14). Available May 28Drawing on newly unearthed material, Deborah Lutz’s This Dark Night is a lively, comprehensive, and thoroughly researched biography of Gothic fiction titan Emily Brontë. Rooted in the dramatic landscape of the Yorkshire moors, Lutz paints a vivid portrait of the surroundings, people and politics that gave rise to Wuthering Heights. Readers hoping for a biography with an exclusive focus on the middle Brontë sister will not find it here, however. So entwined was her life with those of her sisters, Charlotte and Anne, that any attempt to separate Emily entirely would be misrepresentative. It is Lutz’s dissection of Bronte’s works, from early writings set in the fictional Gondal, to her now renowned 1847 novel, that place her at the biography’s centre. Despite a somewhat slow start, This Dark Night, underpinned by wide-ranging sources and expert analysis, is a discerning insight into the woman behind a tale which has captivated generations. (Prudence Wade)
The much-awaited biographical book This Dark Night: Emily Brontë, A Life by Deborah Lutz has hit the shelves.Drawing on formerly inaccessible notebooks and manuscripts, it constructs a portrait of the gothic 1847 novel Wuthering Heights’ author, who is considered to be an elusive figure with a ghostly legacy provoked by her early death.It tackles her relationship with her famous writing sisters Charlotte and Anne, and how grieving their mother impacted her writing.The author also illustrates how Emily, who lived from 1818 to 1848, discussed debates of her time such as class and race, which author Deborah believes still resonate today.She recounted experiencing grief during the writing process.“While I was writing the passages about the death of the Brontës’ mother, my mother died,” she said on social media.“She had been ill and frail for a very long time, so her death was no surprise. But then, exactly a month after her death, my dear, dear dog Penny suddenly died. That loss was devastating, especially on top of my mother’s death,” she added.“When I got back to writing, I had the occasion to ponder the ways that death and grieving became an integral part of Emily Brontë’s work and life.”The 19th-century English-American literature professor is known for her classic works, including The Brontë Cabinet (2015), which brought alive the fascinating lives of the Brontë sisters through the things they wore, stitched, wrote on and inscribed.It was shortlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography and has been translated into Spanish and Japanese. (Rima Al Haddad)
Wuthering Heights was always meant to be controversial. Whether literature fans wanted another adaptation or not, Emerald Fennell’s version was more Gone With the Wind than Edgar Allan Poe. Even so, when the film hit screens for Valentine’s Day 2026, something was missing. The Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie team-up was marketed as one of the steamiest and most erotic romances of the decade.Save for some erotic asphyxiation in the first scene, Wuthering Heights felt extremely performative and did not deliver on the promise of a subversive bodice ripper. Whether the movie was a decent adaptation of Emily Brontë’s book was beside the point. Wuthering Heights failed in its edginess because another film had already stolen its thunder. That honor went surprisingly to Saltburn, Fennell’s second feature, also starring Elordi. [...]Wuthering Heights wasn’t brave enough to make these characters' motivations work and make them truly reprehensible, as opposed to just catty. The film was never going to be a proper adaptation of the Gothic book, but it at least could have been daring. Instead, it was toothless and utterly unsexy, refusing to take any big risks. Love it or hate it, Saltburn at the very least swung for the fences. (Carolyn Jenkins)
Fortunately you don’t have to admire Jacob Elordi’s stab at Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights to be knocked out by On Swift Horses which is a remarkably good film now available on Binge. [...]It’s fascinating – needless to say – what people are saying about the rise of Jacob Elordi. It was no less a figure than Pedro Almodovar who asked whether Jacob Elordi was ‘just a sex symbol or a respected actor’.This was in the context of the great director saying Wuthering Heights was ‘very bad’ and that it was not the fault of Margot Robbie or Jacob Elordi – ‘They do what they can,’ he said. The great Spanish director of Volver added that Frankenstein’s monster was a very convenient role for an actor. (Peter Craven)
The Phoenix Picturehouse and the Ultimate Picture Palace have become two of my regular Oxford haunts. I have seen Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Sirāt, The Secret Agent, and Project Hail Mary, among others.It’s no surprise that I am constantly distracted by soundtracks: the drolly bittersweet placement of Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down”, Charli XCX’s gothic and brooding backdrop to the moors of “Wuthering Heights”, stomach-dropping grief carried by Sirāt’s industrial techno score, and Jeremy Allen White’s sincere recreations of the folk-rock I grew up with. I usually leave the cinema buzzing. Maybe I’m easily impressed, or maybe it has been a great year for music in the media. (Julia Blackmon)
My very favorite book is Jane Eyre, and there’s a part where Mr. Rochester is talking to Jane, and he’s comparing her to a bird in a cage, and he is like, I could crush this cage, but I’d never get at the bird inside. And I mentioned this quote in my first book, when I talked about what actually happened to me when I was kidnapped. My captors could hurt my body, but my body always protected my spirit. I felt that way through my whole life; my body has carried me through every worst day. It’s given me my children. My body has been through a lot, but it has never let anyone crush my spirit. If it stopped protecting me, then I’d be dead. But here I am alive. So now I feel bodybuilding, for me, is honoring my body. Like, taking the time and the care and the attention that it’s deserved all along, because now it’s stronger. I’m healthier, I’m fitter. (Stephanie Radvan and Andrea Simpson)
Speaker Alexander Clifford, a historian and editor of a new edition of Snowden’s autobiography, says: "With typical Yorkshire grit, Snowden overcame grinding rural poverty and paralysing disability to become the Labour Party’s first Chancellor of the Exchequer."But one decision would change his life totally, turning him from socialist hero to traitor and villain and resulting in his expulsion from the party."Snowden embraced his new role with gusto, dedicating the rest of his life to attacking the party and people he had once loved."His bitter, self-destructive quest for vengeance has strange parallels to a more famous fictional moorland outsider."My talk will explore the fascinating story of how and why Philip Snowden betrayed his party to ruthlessly pursue a political vendetta. Was he Labour’s Heathcliff?" (Alistair Shand)
Book to Screen: The new Wuthering HeightsFriday 22 May 2026, 5.30pm – Global StageEmerald Fennell is an Oscar-winning writer and a director known for work that sparks conversation and looks controversy straight in the face. Here she discusses her latest film, a big screen adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights, starring Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff.Fennell first read the book at the age of 14, and says it quite simply “cracked me open”. As we’ve come to expect from the woman behind the controversial Saltburn, Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is provocative, sexy and primal. She's in conversation with the comedian and presenter, Tom Allen.
Wuthering HeightsEmily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights" book was first published in 1847, yet it was still making waves nearly 180 years later by way of a new film adaptation from writer and director Emerald Fennell. Much of that conversation stemmed from discourse over the casting of Heathcliff, who was played by Jacob Elordi (previously the star of Fennell's 2023 feature "Saltburn"). The decidedly Caucasian Australian was not who many people had in mind for the role, considering Heathcliff is described in the text as "dark-skinned" and receives many racially motivated insults that heavily suggest he's a person of color.To boot, Heathcliff being non-white factors heavily into the larger themes (namely class) that defines Brontë's seminal text. These elements all played a role in Heathcliff's whitewashing dominating the pre-release conversation cycle for "Wuthering Heights." Once the film was finally released, further controversy erupted over the drastic liberties Fennell had taken in adapting this project for the big screen.Even the casting of Hong Chau and Shazad Latif in key supporting roles (albeit ones that didn't really comment on or thoughtfully use their racial identities) lent new critical angles to the previous whitewashing controversy. "Wuthering Heights" was a movie plagued by tremendous discourse, though that didn't stop it from grossing $241.6 million worldwide. (Lisa Laman)
6. HathersageHathersage has strong literary connections - having inspired Charlotte Brontë while she was writing Jane Eyre [not exactly]. The nearby North Lees Hall (pictured here) also became the main inspiration for Thornfield Hall. (Tom Hardwick)
Hannah MarkleyStudies in the Novel, Volume 58, Number 2, Summer 2026, pp. 121-137This essay explores how debilitated appetites in Wuthering Heights spread among the novel’s characters as diseases. While critics comment on the ways Heathcliff’s hunger engenders Catherine’s anorectic refusals, Hindley’s alcoholism and Frances’s tubercular consumption also respond to Heathcliff’s arrival at Wuthering Heights, exposing more complex entanglements of physical illness, emotional suffering, and traumatic experience. By situating these appetites in relation to nineteenth-century medical ideas about Anorexia nervosa, inebriety, tuberculosis, and miasma theories of disease, the disabling effects of racial persecution (Heathcliff), gendered confinement (Catherine and Frances), and social dispossession (Hindley) disclose biopolitical distributions of risk along the lines of race, gender, class, and disability that underwrote British racial capitalism, structuring both appetite and embodiment in the provincial scene of the everyday.
Double Fringe First winners Theatre Caddis are set to bring their comedy, Jane Eyre Convention to Edinburgh Fringe this August, following a run in London earlier this Summer.The show is set at the world's first ever Jane Eyre Convention, where we find a group of slightly neurotic Brontë-aficinados [sic] gathered to reenact scenes from their favourite novel.As the group share their passion for all things Jane Eyre, they squabble and fight over the best bits, and conflict over authentic interpretations; also experiencing real emotions as they follow the character of Jane on her journey, including wailing running across the moors! More memorable scenes from the book are relived, as the group attempt to rescue shackled Bertha from the attic.In this fast-paced farce, the enthusiasts feel that they gain new insights and a better understanding of the story of Jane Eyre, and potentially one another. The show promises audiences a funny, uplifting and quirky jaunt - with unrealistic violence, bonnets, and minimal raunch! The show has enjoyed sell-out runs at Lambeth Fringe, and recent shows at the Bread and Roses Theatre, London.The show may also appeal to Brontë fans who enjoyed the recent hype around Emerald Fennel's [sic] adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Theatre Caddis is a London-based theatre company known for staging new, eclectic work, showcasing performances that blend humor, literary homage, and character studies.Jane Eyre Convention is performing at Edinburgh Festival Fringe 6th - 28th (not 10th and 18th) August at 12.25pm (60 mins), Just The Snifter Room at Just The Tonic at The Mash House venue number 288). (Stephi Wild)
Perhaps no artifact captures the intimacy of Victorian hair work quite like a small bracelet housed in the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. Composed of six light brown braids belonging to each of the three sisters – Emily, Charlotte, and Anne – it remains one of the most talked-about pieces of hairwork in existence. The bracelet is technically unwearable now; the clasps are open and one of the braids has come loose. Its power lies not in its intricacy, as the braids themselves are simple up close, but in the identity of its owners. The fact that the Brontë sisters belonged to a lower-middle class family only reinforces how universal the practice was.This very bracelet recently found its way back into popular culture. When Margot Robbie attended a London premiere of Emerald Fennell’s take on Wuthering Heights, she wore a dress adorned with light brown braids inspired by the Brontë piece. Robbie even accessorized her look with a replica of the bracelet itself – a gesture that bridged Victorian sentimentality and contemporary red-carpet fashion in one deliberate styling choice.Hair charms also appear in the literature the Brontës produced. In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff removes a lock of Edgar Linton’s hair from Cathy Earnshaw’s corpse’s locket and replaces it with his own, sending a piece of himself and their love off with her spirit. The plan unravels when Nelly, the housemaid and narrator of the novel, entwines Linton’s hair with Heathcliff’s. Scholar Deborah Lutz described this act as opening up the possibility of a postmortem storm of jealousy between the two men. Though it is the only Brontë novel to directly reference mourning jewelry, the scene underscores how central hair work was to Victorian emotional life.
On this episode of “Read All About It!,” the four hosts give our long-awaited review of the film “Wuthering Heights.”Hosts discuss whether the film is a true adaptation, as many characters were omitted entirely from the movie. (Vanessa Hanna)
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Emily BrontëTranslation by Nicole d'Amonville AlegríaForeword by Cristian OlivéEditorial MolinoISBN: 978-8427254589February 2026En los páramos desolados de Yorkshire, el amor y la venganza se entrelazan en una historia tan salvaje como el viento que azota la mansión de Cumbres Borrascosas. Heathcliff, un huérfano marcado por la humillación y el desprecio, consagra su vida a un amor imposible por Catherine Earnshaw, una obsesión que lo consume hasta la destrucción. Emily Brontë creó una de las novelas más intensas e incomprendidas de la literatura, desafiando las normas sociales de la época y dejando a su paso un reguero de censura y escándalos.
Charlotte Brontë was famously “plain” – and possibly also vain. She cared very much about clothes, and there are many insights to be gained from paying close attention to what is left of her wardrobe. In this unusual biography, a nine-year labour of love, Eleanor Houghton even includes a bar chart tracking the many references to clothes in Brontë’s letters. The author, a Brontë scholar, fashion historian, couture milliner and costume consultant on period dramas, would go so far as to call Brontë’s clothes the only surviving “witnesses” to her subject’s life. The “testimonies” in Charlotte Brontë’s Life Through Clothes derive from chemically analysing fabrics, painstakingly establishing provenance and poring over everything from Brontë’s intricately stitched baby bonnet to the knitted baby socks given to her for the baby she was carrying when she died.At the age of sixteen, Brontë drew a picture of a woman wearing the kind of frock she probably yearned for, with dropped shoulders, puff sleeves and a high waist. Two years later, in 1834, her brother painted her, in the “pillar portrait”, more soberly attired in a dress matching those of her sisters: dark and sombre, with a high neckline, a large modest collar and sleeves that might seem voluminous in 2026, but, Houghton writes, “lack the exuberance (and internal scaffolding) of their peers”. This painting has “disproportionately shaped our views of … [her] appearance and clothing … This drably dressed Charlotte has haunted us through the years”.The real Brontë did eventually manage to indulge her sense of style, and this book shows her, quite literally, fashioning herself. Houghton notes, for example, how Brontë made a dress for her first job as a governess that fastened at the front, so she could dress without help, in privacy, and inserted large hidden pockets so that she could keep her secrets from her prying employers. In a tour de force exegesis of a “greying corset”, Houghton conjures up Brontë in Brussels, in love with her married French teacher, slipping away to buy a “punitive” corset, which gave her such a narrow waist that, much later, George Smith, her editor, would worry that tight lacing had shortened her life.
Muckle, Lacey Nicole; Siegel, Jonah (chair); McGill, Meredith (member); Luciano, Dana (member); Grossman, Jonathan (member);Rutgers University ; School of Graduate Studies, 2026This project focuses on how the ideological and stylistic strategies that Frederick Douglass used in his first autobiography influenced Charlotte Brontë’s immensely popular novel Jane Eyre (1847). Subsequently, Jane Eyre’s widespread influence created a subsection of mid-nineteenth-century reform novels that contain “the rebellious aesthetic,” a narrative style in which authors imported the aesthetic aspects of rebellion from Douglass by-way-of Brontë without considering how different representational strategies might be necessary for different political projects. The first part of this project explains Douglass’s influence on Brontë, and how Brontë’s novel subsequently reproduces the aesthetics of (rather than actually imagines or incites) rebellion. The rest of this project tracks how Douglass’s rhetorical strategies were refracted through Jane Eyre into a set of novels written between the aftermath and enactment of the British Slavery Abolition Act (1833) and the end of the American Civil War (1865). Techniques created by authors of slave narratives came to shape the way white authors represented different political projects. Ultimately, when these authors attempted to portray other social issues using the style of Douglass’s narrative (mediated through Brontë’s novel), the rebellious aesthetic limited how they could imagine or portray different forms of social transformation.
TheWrap: When you started on the project, what were the things that you and Emerald talked about in terms of the look of “Wuthering Heights?”Linus Sandgren: It started with her, obviously, talking about the film in regards to her vision. I hadn’t read the book, I read her script, and she’s really great at actually explaining with few words, so you get images in your head when she’s talking … you sort of see images when she explains things. With “Saltburn,” she would explain how he’s licking the bathtub, you get images in your head.What was lovely was that the core of the story, the core of the visual storytelling comes from how she saw it as she read the book for the first time, basically, and therefore it was a mishmash of inspirational images that could be coming from Brutalist architecture that she’s seen in her neighborhood with films she’s seen as a kid or other things. She built that story in her head and the dream for her was to make a film that looked like that.She wanted to shoot it all on stage. Basically, to be able to create, at least the world, to look in a specific way and not just shoot in a random house. Everything is derived from her fantasy that has evolved, I’m sure, over the years, and so she had very specific ideas for costume and the design. It would be like the element of a rock and she would have images of rocks, and then images of unclear details of an animal on the wall that you don’t know what it is, but it looks gross, but it’s also beautiful, and it’s actually nothing special. It’s just a piece between the leg and the chest on a pig, but it looks like something else.It was [a] playful and very inspirational room that she had, with inspiring images that were not necessarily in the movie but they were helping us feel the freedom to go much further than you would normally do in in a film that would have to stick to reality – in a way that it was meant to be heightened realism and focus on the love story itself and let the world be expressive for this strong love story, in the same way romantic painters painted dramatic landscapes of man and nature. I think we use the same idea in different ways. Nature and man could be combined in, as much as we could fit, everything to whatever goes on emotionally. And then we had the freedom to be more dramatic than normal, Emerald encouraged [it].From shot to shot, as we went through the story, we decided on what would benefit this scene emotionally to make us feel when we watch these images and the actors in them, how they feel like inside, you always want to do that, but I think to a degree, in this case, it was only what we cared about. That was fun, because that was different from other films, and also, it was a dramatic, emotional and sensual story, which also was different for me.Emerald is the most fun to work with, because it’s always laughter. We always have so fun. Doing this film after “Saltburn” was really a fun challenge, but more challenging for all of us was the technical stuff, because it demanded more technical solutions for everything to work.What were those technical challenges?Well, for example, you decide to shoot on stage and build a house on stage with the interior and the exterior of the house. We shot only landscape shots and the introduction and the hanging and different things on location, but otherwise anytime you were outside around the Wuthering Heights house or Thrushcross Grange, it was on stage.One, you need a variation of weather to both entertain the audience, but also, we saw that as an opportunity to use the weather for the different emotions. That was an important key. It’s like when you play Zelda, then you mix these superpower drinks, you put down like a little bit of Kubrick here and then a little bit of “Gone With the Wind” here and German Expressionism there.I always try to think, which painterly style are we in? “Saltburn” was more baroque, because it could be like a picture that depicts something really hard to watch, but at the same time, you can’t resist watching it because it looks great. In this case, it was like, go all in on romanticism, use the nature with the emotions of the characters and an absolute classic.Also, because we were on stage, that it couldn’t look too artificial. The lighting, in a way, I feel like it should look naturalistic as much as possible, like the correct color temperatures that is in the real world, but an unrealistic amount of dramatic lighting, because it was always somewhat dramatic – either it was foggy or it was like rainy or it was the last sun with the dramatic clouds. Because it happened to be always a little bit dramatic, I guess that is what creates that heightened reality or surrealism in combination with strange sets.When we’re on location, we wanted to maintain that look on location and the technical challenges there would become that it’s sunny and windy, and you want to have a foggy looking or rainy looking scene, we added fog and added rain. All those scenes that look foggy or rainy were a challenge. There was also a challenge to light it in such a way that you had a great flexibility, because we shot on, I forgot now how many days, but it must have been over 40 days on the stages. And, from one day to another, you change, or even from one shot to another, you change direction, and a lot of lights are up there in the ceiling and on pipes and stuff. We needed to always have the flexibility to turn around. And so, we had to add more lights than we needed in a way that I basically peppered the ceiling with the LED lights.It was technical challenges like this because we aimed for creating somewhat realistic but also a dramatic once-a-month type of moment for every shot or every scene. Why it becomes a little more surreal but it was really about trying to capture whatever felt important in that particular scene, emotionally, in the most appropriate way, to enhance that with the visuals, which you don’t always do in films, because sometimes you want it to not be looking the way it feels or you want to do it in more subtle ways or realistic ways. Here it was more all in, which was different and fun. (Drew Taylor)
Fans of period dramas – particularly those inspired by novels from the Brontë sisters – are in for an absolute treat, as one largely overlooked television gem is being celebrated as essential viewing. Having accumulated rave reviews and widespread critical acclaim in the years following its release, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall made its debut on the BBC in November 1996.The three-part miniseries is adapted from Anne Brontë's 1848 novel of the same name and was directed by Mike Barker. Available to watch for free on BBC iPlayer, this outstanding period drama has prompted viewers to declare it surpasses even adaptations of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. (Parul Sharma)
Tianming BaiJournal of Victorian Culture, vcag006, https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcag006This essay explores the largely under-read Brontë Parsonage garden. The garden was used as a signifier of the supposed Brontë ‘gloom’ by Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell, two inaugurators of the Brontë myth. By paying attention to how the garden was described in their travelogues, I examine the ways in which later pilgrims to the Brontë shrine in Haworth helped consolidate its reputation for bleakness. The Brontë garden featured in their recollections as a liminal space between English domesticity and Yorkshire wilderness, between femininity and creativity, and between life and death. One myth I want to disentangle is the popular image of Charlotte as the angel who laboured dutifully in the Parsonage garden. It may have been Emily Brontë who cared about gardening. I then argue that the Parsonage garden and the Yorkshire moors are places where later occupants and pilgrims can negotiate their affiliations with the literary family, the region, and a version of the nation the Brontës came to embody. Whereas the Haworth moorland embodies a regionalist perception of Northern Englishness as wild and barren, in the afterlife of the Brontës, the garden usually attests to a notion of Englishness as cultivated, delicate, and disciplined. The various transformations the Parsonage garden underwent in the half-century since the 1860s, the various responses to such changes, as well as recent creative refashioning of the image of the ‘Brontës in the garden’, all speak to the transformation of the Brontë myth and the ever-changing affiliations of locals, visitors, and the public with Brontë heritage.
